


I Have Measured Out My Life With Teaspoons

by myrtlebroadbelt



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Bilbo Baggins-Centric, Character Study, Gen, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 15:54:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15004268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrtlebroadbelt/pseuds/myrtlebroadbelt
Summary: "While there’s tea, there’s hope," his father had said once. If that was true, Bilbo’s life had been a hopeful one indeed.





	I Have Measured Out My Life With Teaspoons

His first sip came from an empty cup. Belladonna found him on his bedroom carpet, surrounded by dishes stolen from the lowest kitchen shelves, tilting an imaginary pot for a party of stuffed bears and one crochet dragon who was missing a wing.

“Be careful not to spill,” he told the dragon, in such an uncanny imitation of his father that Belladonna startled him with her laugh.

She took him to the kitchen and poured him a cup of chamomile. “You can try some of this for now,” she told him, and though he pouted about it, he took a sip anyway.

“Blech,” Bilbo said with a wrinkle of his nose. “It tastes like grass.”

Belladonna finished the cup herself — and refrained from asking how her son had learned the taste of grass in the first place.

 

 

When he was tall enough to reach the second lowest kitchen shelves, Bilbo was allowed to drink real tea. Bungo poured it at four o’clock on the dot, and set out an extra cup.

Bilbo sat at the kitchen table with his legs swinging as his father spooned the sugar and stirred the milk. “Wait until it’s cooled a bit,” he warned, and Bilbo swung his legs faster, resting his chin on his hands and staring at the steam as it rose from the surface.

When Bungo nodded, he reached for the cup, mimicking how his father wrapped his fingers around the handle, how his mother balanced the wide rim with her other hand. With a noisy slurp, he took his first sip.

It was bitter at first, but then it was sweet, and creamy, and warm as it seeped to his belly. He took another sip, and it felt calm, like his mother stroking his hair as he fell asleep. Another, and he suddenly felt like he could fight a dragon. But how could he feel both at once? It had to be magic.

“Well?” said Belladonna. “Do you like it?”

Bilbo was too busy taking another sip, and then another, and then another, to answer her.

 

 

On the morning of his thirty-third birthday, Belladonna nudged her son awake shortly after dawn and slipped a cup of tea into his sleepy hands. She sat on the edge of his bed and watched him as he slumped against the cushions and tilted it to his mouth.

Bilbo eyed her from beneath a mess of curls. “Don’t you start. It’s just a number.”

“I didn’t say a thing,” she said, sipping from her own cup. “Just promise when you’re off on your adventures, you’ll stop home for tea every now and again.”

“Well, I won’t be going on any adventures, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

“We’ll see,” Belladonna said in that way of hers, and pulled a pair of biscuits from the pocket of her dressing gown.

 

 

Three years on and still no adventures, Bilbo carried a cup of tea to his parents’ bedroom as slowly as he could, hoping it would go cold so he would have to make another one.

The cup was for Belladonna. Or for Bungo. Or for him. Or to sit undrunk on the bedside table. He hadn’t really decided what to do with it, but he knew that there was nary a problem that a cup of tea could not fix. At least, that was what his father had told him, long ago, and yet not long enough.

Bilbo should have walked faster. The cup fell with a shatter on the threshold when he entered the room, its contents splashing with a sting against his toes as he saw his mother hunched over the form of her husband beneath the quilt, and he knew that half the breath had been stolen from the room.

 

 

When the other half departed, not ten years on, Bilbo found himself once again in the kitchen putting the kettle on, because it was four o’clock and that’s what one did. As he listened intently to the quiet, he realized that the cup currently warming his hands, the very same Belladonna had drunk from not a week before, was now his.

He looked at the table, at the sugar jar, at the vase on the windowsill and the curtains that covered the window. They were all his now, as was the tile beneath his feet and beams above his head and the paint on the door. He had the papers and the names etched in stone to prove it.

It was too bad, he thought as he took his first lonely sip, that he didn’t want any of it.

 

 

After he had good-morning’d the wizard and watched him make his merry way down the path, Bilbo drank his tea with one eye on the window. _What will the neighbors think?_ he wondered as he tipped the teapot.

 _The nerve of him._ (He spilt some on the table.) _An adventure._ (He forgot how many spoonfuls of sugar he had taken, so he added another.) _What a ridiculous idea._ (Oh dear, that was entirely too much milk.) _I should alert the shirriff._ (Wrong spoon. That one was in the jam jar.)

 _I do hope he doesn’t come back_ , Bilbo thought, and took a sip of the worst cup of tea he had ever tasted.

 

 

“I’ll be all right,” Bilbo said. “Just let me sit quietly for a moment.”

He took a sip of the chamomile one of the dwarves had pushed on him when he came to. He thought he remembered neat grey hair and large round ears, but it was a puzzle to distinguish them, and he _had_ just recovered from a faint to the carpet.

It was very good, he noted as Gandalf blathered on about Tooks and goblin wars. Not grassy at all.

 

 

His tea was still warm when he left. He had made it to stop himself from going, to tether himself to a routine so he couldn’t run out the door. He had barely filled the cup halfway when the tether broke, and he rushed to find his pack and his walking stick, and a pen to sign his name.

The Baggins had poured, but the Took refused to drink.

 

 

By Rivendell, he had forgotten the taste of tea. So tired was he of waterskins and campfire coffee, that he nearly clambered across the dinner table when he saw an elf set down a silver teapot.

He was breathless as he tilted it into a handleless cup, anticipating a stream of rich, reddy brown. The disappointment on his face was unmistakable as he found himself staring into a greenish yellow abyss, murky with leaves, flowers, and — was that a root?

The dwarves stared at Bilbo askance as he took his first sip. If chamomile tasted like grass, this tasted like Bag End’s entire garden had been pulled up by a hurricane. With as dignified an expression as he could muster, he swallowed it down and placed his cup back on the table.

“I don’t like green drinks, either,” he heard Ori inform his brother.

 

 

Bilbo suspected the tea in Lake-town wasn’t much better, although he never actually drank it. His memory of entering the house, and the thought of where the water had come from — no matter how thoroughly it had been boiled — made the cup, handed to him by Bard’s eldest daughter, less than desirable.

It was the right color, but that only made it worse.

He made a show of blowing on it, of bringing it to his lips and tilting it just so, of warming his hands around it. Then, sufficiently convinced no one was looking, he tipped it out the open window into the lake below.

That’s when he turned to discover a pair of blue eyes watching him. His heart skipped one beat out of guilt, and another out of astonishment, when he saw Thorin Oakenshield smile.

 

 

Before the battle, Bilbo stared into a fire at Dale, surrounded by weathered men, and sipped from tea that he didn’t taste. Perhaps it was the cold, which had numbed his lips so he could barely feel where the metal cup slipped between them.

More likely, though, it was the thought of a chamber of gold, of a large white jewel, of the mithril vest that hung from his shoulders, of an army of elves and angry fishermen. Perhaps it was simply the pair of eyes he did not recognize in a face he did, somewhere inside the mountain.

When he looked up from the fire, the men were gone and his cup was empty, and dawn was creeping over the horizon.

 

 

(After the battle, Bilbo did not drink tea. He went with the dwarves to the mountain, where they had none.)

 

 

When Bilbo returned to Bag End, he found a teacup — stained, and chipped in two places — on the floor of the empty kitchen. He plucked a rusted, rejected kettle from the sparse shelves, coaxed water from a reluctant tap, and built a fire in the stone-cold hearth. Using a spoon recovered from Lobelia’s loot, he scooped loose leaves from a tin at the back of the pantry.

How odd, he thought as he sat on the cool tile drinking from a milkless, sugarless cup, to return to the comforts of home and find them so hard to come by.

 

 

Tea was at four, he had told them. Yet it was an inkpot, not a teapot, which sustained him on this particular afternoon. A knock came just as he was in the middle of a word, and he walked to the door with a grumble

He was greeted on the other side of it by a row of beards, whose owners bowed in unison.

“I thought I told you not to bother knocking,” he said, and turned with a grin to put the kettle on.

 

 

It had been quite some time since Bilbo had last taken tea with anyone but himself, when Drogo and Primula’s boy arrived at Bag End. He could feel the tween’s curious eyes on him as he rummaged through the kitchen for a clean cup.

“Here we are,” he said when he found one, and set about pouring. “How do you take yours?”

Frodo, who had spoken no more than three words since he walked through the door, looked at him with a serious expression and said, “I don’t like tea.”

Bilbo didn’t know whether to feel shocked or embarrassed, so he settled for both. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, my lad. Very rude of me to presume. Is there anything else I can get —”

Frodo was smiling at him.

Bilbo let out a breath. “Ah, I see. You like to joke.” He sat down across from the boy and passed the sugar. “We’ll get along just fine.”

 

 

Before he left, he thought of asking Frodo to help him drain the Old Winyard, but the boy already suspected too much. So he offered it to Gandalf, but Gandalf wanted tea. So he made it for him, watching with quiet amusement as the wizard held the small cup in his large hands, and tried not to think about the weight in his pocket, and what would soon have to be done about it.

 

 

Elrond welcomed him to Rivendell with a feast. He was grateful to rest his feet and fill his belly, but when the silver teapot materialized, he was very suddenly not in the mood for whatever was inside.

“Nonsense,” Elrond told him, tilting the pot. “I insist.”

Bilbo winced, prepared to see a waterfall of hedge trimmings emerge from the spout. Instead, he was surprised to see a clear copper brown.

Elrond smiled at his expression. “You didn’t expect us to house a hobbit in our midst without serving a proper Shire-tea, did you?”

“The magic of elves,” Bilbo sighed, and reached for a teaspoon.

 

 

_“While there’s tea, there’s hope,” his father had said once, playing with another of his sayings as he poured the final drops of their latest brew. If that was true, Bilbo’s life must have been a hopeful one indeed._

 

 

On a ship which chased the setting sun, he leaned against Frodo and closed his eyes upon a misting breeze. “Remind me again where we’re going?” he asked, for his memory wasn’t what it used to be.

“To the Undying Lands,” Frodo told him, his voice tired but patient.

“Hmm,” said Bilbo, and thought for a moment. “And tell me, my lad — how is the tea there?”

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a play on a line from ["The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock) by T.S. Eliot.
> 
> Thanks for reading! I'm on [tumblr](http://myrtlebroadbelt.tumblr.com/).


End file.
